Flesh and Wood - a new novel by Roger Frederick

one

When Jemma first saw the hand lying there among dried husks of tiny green crabs, for a moment she thought it was real. It was a brief moment, less than a second probably. But that didn’t lessen the shock of her discovery. Feeling violently dizzy, she had to sit down quickly on a nearby rock.

The sea mist was thicker than usual that morning and, sat there at the water’s edge, she could easily have been mistaken for the ghost of some shipwrecked pirate.

Since the accident, her complexion was generally sickly. And, as the blood drained from her gaunt face, her skin turned a pallid yellowy grey, the colour of skulls. Her hair was long and wild and tied in a loose pony tail with a scarf of small blue roses. She wore a long gypsy skirt and a blue and cream striped linen top, over which she had pulled on what she called her ‘life jacket’, a bright orange puffa jacket without sleeves. It was not the kind of jacket an eighteenth century sea dog would have worn (nor would they have sported lurid Puma trainers). However, aside from that, she did have a certain piratical air about her, and could easily have been sat there waiting to unload a ghost ship of smuggled doubloons.

On those early autumn mornings, there was a magic about the shoreline that fed the imagination. In the misty stillness she often saw serpents swim and heard dragons snort awake in the caves beneath the cliffs. She enjoyed these childlike daydreams, friendly fantasies over which she had complete control.

Discovering a hand lying by the rock pools was not something she would ever choose to imagine. And although she was fairly certain it was not an actual human hand, a second wave of panic ran through her.

Perhaps the hallucinations had returned. Perhaps she was not getting better after all. Perhaps that feeling of increasing strength was itself an illusion.

Jemma closed her eyes, and started to breathe deeply, thinking of journeys in her head - the way she’d learned to break the grip of those tormenting visions, the sinister snakes and children who’d appeared when she’d first come out of her coma.

It was strange. After waking up in hospital, she could remember almost nothing about herself, her job, her history, nothing except the mental maps she had drawn while driving from client to client. Even though she couldn’t recall who the clients were or what they did or why she had been visiting them, those routes were totally intact in her head.

It was as if they had been stored in some bomb-proof cerebral filing cabinet, left battered but untouched when the rest of her memories had exploded in that collision of flesh and wood when Stuart’s 5-series had skidded on slurry spattered by a passing muck spreader, careered through the crumbling wall of a low bridge and crumpled brutally into a weeping willow. Suspended over a stream, she’d somehow clung onto life as shallow waters flowed slowly over her rear axle and washed blood and brake fluid down stream.

As the neurologists never tired of telling her, it was a miracle that she survived. The jagged branch that pierced the air bag had torn into her skull and embedded itself in her frontal lobe. A millimetre more and it would have been curtains. She was lucky, everyone told her, so very, very lucky. They were astonished at how well she had recovered.

She should be pleased, said Lucy (her inanely positive psychotherapist) that she’d escaped any major damage - aside of course from the limp, the headaches, the memory problems, the dent in her skull, the scarring on her forehead, the Post Traumatic Stress, and the terrifying hallucinations.

“You should try staying positive,” Jemma told Lucy, “when snakes crawl out of the chiller cabinets in Tesco Express and start to wind up your leg like bindweed, and your bowels open in terror every time you see a school crossing sign.”

To be fair to Lucy, her suggestion of recalling those lists of landmarks and turnings had been an effective way to escape the torment of hissing cobras and bullying voices. But as the hallucinations had become less frequent and severe, she’d been thankful that she no longer had to routinely relive her old driving routes.

It reminded her too much of her life before - the career, the clothes, the flat, the dinners, the lifestyle that had been as irreversibly trashed as Stuart’s BMW. Besides, the more she used the technique, the less effective it had become. Pythons begun to invade her memories, and infant faces loomed along the roads that she travelled in her mind.

However, that morning she had to make sure she wasn’t just imagining the hand on the beach. So, she closed her eyes and pictured herself on the M5 slip road. She cruised down the country lanes of Westingshire, past the house with the tall brick wall and the big gates, and the pick your own farm with the Maize Maze. She took the second left past the refurbished Wheatsheaf Inn and continued past the cider orchards until she arrived at the converted barn of an organic wine distributor to whom Westing Information Systems had supplied server maintenance and order processing software. The imagined journey (which was thankfully snake-free) took two or three minutes.

When she opened her eyes the hand was still there on the sand. She was relieved that it appeared not to be a hallucination. And as her pulse subsided and her head cleared, her initial feelings of panic gave way to curiosity.

Jemma pushed her right palm into a limpet-coated rock to lever herself upright. She leaned on her walking stick to steady her wobbling knees and rummaged in her shoulder bag for her glasses. This took a while as the bag was large and cluttered with all kinds of crap: tissues; half-opened packets of cough sweets; her bottles of tablets (including the ones for epilepsy which the doctors insisted on prescribing even though she had no intention of ever taking them); her credit cards (unused for months); a deodorant; an almost empty CK Escape tester spray (appropriated from the village chemist); several pens (one of which had leaked and the rest of which were too dampened by sea mist to ever write again); scraps of paper (on which she was supposed to write miscellaneous thoughts or recollections for later reference); a couple of stray Lil-lets, three lipsticks and a mini tub of lip balm; and keys, lots of keys.

The search for the specs was even more frustrating than usual. Jemma’s fingers were numb from the sea mist, and the shock of her unexpected discovery had sent her into a mild panic, which made her muddle up objects.

It was weird. For example, Jemma knew she had to use a knife to cut a loaf of bread, but instead of picking up a knife from the kitchen table, she might pick up a margarine lid and would start trying to saw the loaf with that. There was always this moment of limbo, a few seconds of confusion, before her brain realigned itself and realised that she was doing something ridiculous. During those moments she would think, there’s something wrong with this knife. It’s difficult to hold. It’s not cutting properly. Then suddenly, like a blurred image coming into focus, she would realise what she was doing. Sometimes it was comical, sometimes quite dangerous and sometimes just bizarre.

At first, it had made her upset. Now it was just draining, exasperating. Searching through her bag Jemma had to concentrate on every item her fingers touched, pause, then leave time for her brain to register what it was, before moving onto the next item. Eventually she felt the case that held her glasses. She fumbled them on and peered down at the hand which lay on the other side of a small rock pool.

It was an eerily lifelike replica, carved from what looked like dark brown slate. Jemma comforted herself that, such was the accuracy of the carving, it could quite easily have given anyone a shock. Intrigued, she risked negotiating the rocks beside the pool to reach the patch of damp sand on which the hand lay, then stooped down clumsily to touch it. She was surprised to discover that the hand was actually made from wood, but had been so highly polished it had taken on the lustre of stone.

Strangely, the wood was dry and unblemished. There was no way it could have been washed ashore in that condition. And if anyone had dropped it the previous day while clambering over the rocks, it would have been as damp as everything else on the beach. Logic suggested it must have arrived on the beach in the previous few moments. But how had it got there?

Puzzled, Jemma held the wooden hand gingerly in her left hand (the hand that still gripped properly) and looked around. Behind her was a sheer cliff face, about forty feet high topped by woodland (where roots clung perilously to crumbling rock) and in front of her a narrow band of rock pools that led down to the grey expanse of Black Gill cove and the Atlantic Ocean.

Jemma was at the far end of the beach and to her left the rocks that jutted into the sea were impassable. So the hand must have been dropped (or placed) by someone who had approached that point from the village. But she was certain she had passed no one that morning, aside from a couple of old fishermen by the harbour who had greeted her as usual with non-committal grunts and nods.

It was possible, of course, someone might have passed her hidden in the mist. But that still didn’t explain what they were doing on the beach so early (and so carelessly) with such an exquisitely executed carving. On closer inspection the detailing on the hand seemed almost surreally accurate - each nail, each knuckle, each fingerprint whirl was delicately and obsessively scratched into the surface. It was almost too beautiful, too scary to touch. Jemma had become so engrossed in looking and feeling it, she had momentarily forgotten where she was, when suddenly she felt a touch on her shoulder.

With a small shriek, Jemma flung the wooden hand high into the air, her heart like a hammer drill. She turned to see, with relief, that the touch belonged not to some chisel wielding phantom, but, rather, Winnie Wilkins, who was walking Tegan, her Welsh Springer Spaniel, along with Oscar, a nondescript terrier who belonged to an even more elderly neighbour.

“Sorry, my love. I didn’t mean to startle you. It’s just I saw you standing there on the beach and wanted to make sure you were all right.”

Concern poured from the old lady’s watery eyes.

Jemma smiled, relieved to see her occasional walking companion and the two dogs with tails madly wagging.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I just didn’t hear you coming”

“You’ve gone ever so pale,” said Winnie.

“No really, I’m fine thank you.” said Jemma. She smoothed her fringe across her face - a habit she had developed to veil the scarring above her left eye and the dent in her forehead. She glanced down at the sand to see where the hand had fallen.

“Have you lost something?” asked Winnie. She reigned in Tegan and Oscar as they sniffed at the sand, the smell of rotting crab and seaweed. Jemma hesitated.

“This may sound strange,” she began to say, looking around, “but I just found...” As she spoke she spotted the hand lying beside a rock covered in sticky black clumps of mussels.

To her dismay, she saw that the hand now only had four fingers - the little one, had been knocked off as it landed. She stooped down to retrieve the sculpture and hunted guiltily for the missing digit. She spotted it by the side of a pool and reached over to scoop it up from the wet sand.

“Careful dear,” said Winnie. She grabbed at Jemma’s arm as she rose stiffly from her hunched position. In truth, Jemma found the grip of the old lady’s fingers uncomfortable and intrusive and of very little assistance. Winnie was far from frail. Indeed, she was, as the fishermen put it, a ‘game old bird’. However, she had a tendency to rheumatism. And on such cold mornings the sea mist soaked deep into her bones, draining the strength from her.

As Jemma rose to her feet, rather than gaining any support from Winnie’s clutch, she felt the weight of the older lady pulling her sideways. Jemma stumbled and had to cling onto her to prevent them both ending up in a heap on the sand. They wobbled together for a moment, backwards and forwards like a pair of drunken sailors crossing deck in a choppy sea.

“A little bit rusty this morning,” said Winnie.

Jemma wasn’t sure which of them she was referring to. She had an urge to tug rudely away from the old lady. However, her professional forbearance - that sales woman’s ability to overlook unwelcome touches - took over. And she smiled politely and thanked Winnie for her help.

A few months earlier, Jemma would have dismissed the woman as an irrelevant irritation, another obstacle to be avoided or ignored if she were to hit target. However, that was then. Time was the one thing she had plenty of now. Besides, she saw in Winnie not precisely a kindred spirit, but at least someone who understood what it was like to wake in the morning and feel as if your legs had been replaced by logs and, after you had lifted yourself from the bed, to look in the mirror and see another’s face, a hideous, haggard mask, superimposed (by age or accident) on your face as it was before (that youthful visage of faded photos and dreams), to see yourself so changed and feel so tired, and yet still get up and get dressed and hobble down to the beach and succumb to the slumberous spell of that relentless grey, ocean.

So, Jemma did not pull away from Winnie immediately, but let her hand remain on her arm. And for a moment neither of them said anything. They just stood there totally still as if they and the sea and the sky and the sand were all part of some paused video, until Winnie’s grip released and they separated, slow and jerky, frame by frame.

Jemma expected Winnie to react to the wooden hand as she had with shock and surprise. However, she hardly seemed to notice that Jemma was holding it. She just peered vaguely at the cliff face, almost as if she were in a trance. Jemma was suddenly aware that Winnie could not actually see the wooden hand, could see hardly anything. To her, the beach was a blur of indiscriminate greys and browns and blues. In fact, she had probably only identified Jemma by the brightness of her gilet, the orange standing out like a buoy among an abstract sea of shapes and colours.

It explained why Winnie sometimes seemed so vague and lost and why she had such a rigorous routine, walking precisely the same path, at the same time each morning before anyone but Jemma and the fishermen were about.

It also explained why she never released the dogs from their leads, and snapped at them so fiercely if ever they were distracted by a cat or a discarded kebab. It was not that she was by nature a cruel mistress. It was purely fear. Fear that the dogs might drag her from that one narrow path she knew. Fear of how helpless she would be if she did not retain some kind of control.

Jemma touched the hollow in her skull and flattened her hair again across that jagged scar. Then she reached out for Winnie’s hand.

“Look this is what I found on the beach, the most amazing sculpture, just lying there.”

She wrapped Winnie’s fingers gently around the wooden hand and shared in the old lady’s pleasure - the sensation of her wrinkled finger tips caressing the carving as if discovering for the first time the smooth warmth of a lover’s flesh, the realisation of the fingerprint whirls so delicately carved into the wood.

Winnie was transported away momentarily, a smile of some half remembered romance flickering, becoming sad and sinking all in a second.

“A hand,” she said, “a hand.” She frowned. “But it only has four fingers.”

“I’m afraid one of the fingers got broken.” said Jemma. “But I should be able to stick it back on with some of that glue.”

She recalled a green plastic bottle of wood glue her dad had kept in his shed. The smell of glue and varnish and fresh paint filled her nostrils. She remembered the glue was pure white, and set like peeling skin on her fingers the day she’d helped him mend the broken strut on her doll’s cot. She’d thrown it against the wall in a tantrum and then limped and sobbed her way downstairs, pretending she’d tripped over it. She tasted salt in her mouth. The taste was so intense she did not know if it was the sand on her fingers or a vivid memory of those crocodile tears.

A few moments earlier Jemma had not been sure what to do with the wooden hand. Had it been intact she would probably have left it on the edge of the sea wall near the harbour where the owner might possibly have found it. But now that it was broken she thought she might as well take it home and protect it from further damage.

After all, who knows who might find it - some bored kids who would kick it like a can then smash it to splinters against a rock, or someone who would take it home and paint it with white emulsion and stick it on a windowsill in some draughty utility room above an ancient tumble drier.

“I thought,” said Jemma, taking the hand back from Winnie. “I might take it home and mend it. I don’t know who left it here. But they obviously don’t want it any more”

Winnie nodded.

“What a good idea,” she said. “You keep it.”

Jemma smiled gratefully at the old lady, and they steered each other away from the rock pools and back across the beach to the harbour.